Walter Laqueur obituary

Influential but pessimistic historian who tried to find answers to the Holocaust and was among the first scholars to study terrorism

Thursday November 15 2018, 12.01am, The Times

Laqueur, pictured here in the mid-1960s, was a prolific writer, producing books almost at the rate of one a year

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Thursday November 15 2018, 12.01am, The Times

In an ideal world, Walter Laqueur used to muse, he would have liked to have lived in 19th-century Paris, a place of brilliant art and music, a shining example of the European culture with which, in its best form, he identified so strongly.

However, the reality was that the life Laqueur was born into was disintegrating horribly as he became an adult in the 1930s. His own flight as a Jewish adolescent from Germany left his parents behind to be murdered in the Holocaust. And Laqueur, moving between the Middle East, Britain, the US and back to Europe, spent his life thinking, debating and writing prolifically about the rise and fall of societies, the violence that could tear them apart, the dangers and convulsions that